This is starting to be a huge problem. I'm trying to edit a project with about 160 EX clips in it - the edit isn't complicated; no longer than 5 minutes in total, from about 80 minutes of footage. When rendering out, Media Encoder crashes/freezes at random, irrespective of what format I'm trying to render to. The only way I've been able to output it so far is as two TGA sequences (restarting from the point it crashed at, ending up with two sequences, importing these into good ole After Effects and adding the soundtrack - a bloody ludicrous way to do it). Anyone got any ideas why this is happening or what we can do to sort it out? It's a fully legal, fully up to date copy of CS4 running on Vista x64 on a by no means underpowered machine (dual quad core Xeon, 16 Gb RAM, 600GB of 15k rpm SAS drive, Quadro 3700 graphics card). It seems to be to do with the number of clips we're using rather than the amount of footage - we've edited projects with less clips, but more footage, with no problems. When AME crashes it usually takes Prem down with it too. I am seriously thinking about switching to Avid Media Composer if I can't sort this out

Update. Since the project was crashing Prem every time I tried to open it, I tried opening an (older) EDL I'd exported. This worked fine. After manually relinking about 200 clips (why why why is Prem's relinking sooo bad??) I tried saving the new project. This crashed Premiere; it had worked fine about 10 minutes before, when I'd saved a version that didn't have all the clips re-linked. So it seems there is some kind of upper limit for the amount of XDCAM EX clips you can use in a project.

I managed to open the damaged prproj (the one Premiere wouldn't open) in After Effects with no problems. The only trouble is that it didn't pick up any of the transitions (I'd used a few dissolves here and there, nothing complicated). Exporting it as a Premiere project and trying to load it again in Premiere didn't work properly, as AE had created extra video tracks and made it look more like a layered AE comp.

I can't believe I'm the only one who's tried editing XD EX projects with Premiere - and this isn't really a complex project, it's just got a couple of hundred clips in it. Can anyone shed any light on what I might be doing wrong?

transitions don't carry over to AFTER EFFECTS. that's why that is happening.

Best thing to do if you can export a photo sequence and render from there. I mean if it works do it...;.

I don't have any XDCAM footage but the reason you render fails is most likely a program or plug-in or driver. That has to be it no other question about it. There is no switch or anything that will fix your problem based on the info given. Sorry.

Did you get this sorted out or are you now on AVID? I'm having apalling problems with XDCAM EX footage in a project that is, like yours, not complex. My issue that only the first export of a project is usable - after that the export is unusable (see my question "CS4 - Only the first export is successful"). If you sorted it out, PLEASE tell me how and if you have any ideas on my problem PPPplllleeeeaaassssseeeeee help.

I've still had this problem. Specifically it seems to happen more with footage shot at 720p, and even more specifically, seems to occur more on our edit suite (8-core, 16GB, should be able to cope) than a laptop we also use (dual-core, 4GB). To the extent that the last couple of projects we shot, we've edited on the laptop. This suggests it's a problem with the codecs on the edit suite, although even the laptop's not 100% reliable and projects crash and freeze fairly frequently.

The only safe workaround we've come up with so far is to down-res all the footage to DV AVI and edit with that. This has worked fine so far because nobody's needed a project in HD, but obviously isn't much use if they do. We've tried transcoding to other codecs, but not had great results - we haven't so far had the time to do a proper test, creating the same project in a variety of different codecs and seeing which one's the most stable.

So: it's still a problem. Has anyone else had this happen to them? What, if any, workarounds have you come up with?